Business

The manufacturers of the popular Pandama brand of local fruit wines, Warren and Tracy Douglas, are to establish a learning centre to help refine and enhance the range of skills in the local creative industry with a view to broadening product range and increasing both domestic and overseas marketability of goods produced in the sector.

Helen Bremner’s circumstances are by no means unique. She is a skilful and creative seamstress whose talent is not matched by her resources and for whom GuyExpo offers an opportunity to get discovered, to break into the ‘big time.’

The John Fernandes Ltd subsidiary, JP Santos & Company Ltd, has seen an increase in its gross profit for the half year ended June 2011 compared with the same period last year.

Stock market updates

Concerns over the possibility of hacking could be among the reasons for the limited number of stand-alone Automatic Teller Machines (ATM) installed by commercial banks even in the face of complaints by customers over the lengthy queues, a banking source has said.

Say the name Twins and Guyanese who are old enough will take you back at least 60 years to a time when remedies for common maladies—pains and sprains—were to be found at the village drug store; when concerned parents choose the pharmacist as their first resort to diagnose and heal their children’s sudden and discomfiting ailments, the doctor being pressed into service only if and when the ailment persisted.

The Business Cartoon

Agriculture Minister Robert Persaud’s disclosure that the skills that are necessary to run the Skeldon Sugar Factory properly simply do not exist within the company or, for that matter, within the country is probably not all that surprising when one considers that despite the much-touted view that the skills base with the sugar industry is sufficiently adequate, the performance of the industry, particularly its field performance, has been, in large measure, a function of the continuous flow of skilled managers out of GuySuCo.

Jamaican farmers are working with the Ministry of Agriculture’s export division in an effort to ‘tame’ the country’s turmeric cultivation and transform it into an export money-earner.

Context According to the Bank of Guyana, the economy grew by 5.9 percent during the first half of this year. 

Export of greenheart logs from Guyana continues to be ‘on hold’ in the face of the sustained high demand for the species on the local market to meet the needs of the domestic building programme.

The John Fernandes Ltd subsidiary, JP Santos & Company Ltd, has declared a sharp reduction in its gross profits for the half year ended June 2011 compared with the previous half year ended December 31, last year.

GASCI (www.gasci.com/telephone Nº 223-6175/6) reports that session 427’s trading results showed consideration of $2,941,143 from 201,830 shares traded in 14 transactions as compared to session 426 which showed consideration of $205,000

New food safety legislation enacted by the Obama administration and scheduled to come into force in January next year could hurt local exporters of food to the United States, according to Head of the Government Analyst Food and Drugs Department Marilyn Collins Come January the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will begin to enforce the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) passed into law earlier this year and requiring prior testing of food products being imported into the United States by accredited in-country laboratories.

The Council for the Promotion of Inter-national Trade (CCPIT) in China has agreed to investigate various incidents on loss and inconvenience suffered by Guyanese businesses that have imported goods from China following protests made at a meeting between CCPIT officials and officials of the Guyana/China Business Council (GCBC) in Port of Spain earlier this month.

Economic Ties The prominence of China in the Caribbean is a reality that the world will have to contend with, but most certainly the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. 

Countries in the Asia/Pacific region continue to tighten their stranglehold on expanding tropical fruit markets in the United States and the European Community, even as the fruit industry in the Caribbean continues to show few signs of making any significant impact on the region’s agricultural exports.

There is no doubt that the Chinese delegation to the Third China-Caribbean Economic and Trade Forum, journeyed to Port-of-Spain earlier this month with the specific intention of dazzling the region with its new-found status as one of the world’s few genuine economic giants.

For more than 30 years beekeeping or apiculture has been pursued primarily as a hobby with apiaries yielding modest amounts of honey sufficient to sustain no more than a cottage industry.

Business Cartoons